I have taken a few of your writing courses and I loved them. I need to make enough money to contribute to the bottom line of our family, and I don’t want to create more pressure on my writing which is what would happen if I were relying on my writing to support the family. Can you recommend a course I can take the give me a passive income option?

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I’m not sure what you mean by passive income. I think it’s a myth. If there’s someone you can point to who has “passive” income, I can show you why it isn’t passive. The poster child for passive income is Tim Ferriss, and I wrote a blog post about how he actually works harder than almost anyone I know:

Most people who say they have “passive income” are people who are constantly refining their email funnel. They say they have a product that sells itself. But they actually work hard all the time finding people who will find the product that sells itself.

So a better question to ask yourself is how can you leverage your strengths to create a reliable income while you work independently.

If you are an NT or an SJ type — someone who loves details and creating finely tuned systems — then you’ll be good at creating an online business. Most people who brag about their passive income have online businesses. These businesses take a lot of work to build, but if you like the work of building and maintaining them, the income will feel like easy money because it always feels easier to earn money when you’re doing something you’re good at.

As an NF type — someone who has great intuition when it comes to people — the best way for you to create a reliable income stream working independently is to leverage your special ability to connect with people. Freelancing is a great way to do that because getting clients is all about relationships.

You might not want to actually do the work you sell — for example you would get bored building web sites or writing marketing plans. But you’d be great at selling to clients because you could hear their problems and you could figure out what would make them happy. You can always give the work to someone else to do and take a cut off the top.

Another way to look at it: The best freelancers are people who cultivate good relationships. So you should take the freelancing course to see how you can make that work for yourself: